1. Reproduced from L&Si magazine, August-September 2011
www.lsionline.co.uk
companyprofile
34 Reproduced from L&Si magazine, August-September 2011
www.lsionline.co.uk
companyprofile
35
Phil Ward drops in at one of
the UK’s leading loudspeaker
makers and finds very little
resistance . . .
Ohm Service
UK - I’m still not really sure what an ohm is.
I know it’s a metric unit, from the International
System of Units, and that it measures
electrical resistance, and that we have one
Georg Simon Ohm of Bavaria to thank for it.
Some have even called him the Mozart of
electricity. I also know that there’s a huge
bowl pointing at the sky not far from the
factory and headquarters of Ohm UK Ltd, in
the fine English county of Cheshire. I bet both
Ohm UK and the Jodrell Bank radiotelescope
make full use of Georg’s discoveries; both
establishments are certainly shining some
new light on things.
Firstly, Ohm UK Ltd is a proudly engineering-led
British manufacturer. Its founder and MD, Jo
Olenski, is of Polish descent, via Manchester, and is
one of those entrepreneurs who keeps some of his
lustre on or near a bushel. It’s no secret that certain
other loudspeaker brands appear larger in the sky,
even though they’re not nearly as close to the
University of Manchester’s Centre for Astrophysics,
but Ohm’s processes and products are every bit as
painstaking in the pursuit of excellence.
Pretty much all the components are made
here, including woodwork, metalwork, electronics
and drivers. That’s a major statement in today’s
market, and while there are, er, satellite operations
in Poland and China, they more or less duplicate
this effort to spread cost and improve logistics.
“It’s all to do with capacity,” explains Clive Kinton,
Ohm’s sales manager. “Ohm UK has a strong track
record in OEM, especially through the Polish facility.
At the same time, it gives us a means of servicing
the East European market more directly. The
Chinese factory is a partnership - insofar as you can
have one, as foreign ownership isn’t particularly
easy - and concentrates on product areas such as
ceiling speakers and accessories. There’s also
a very large Chinese domestic market catered for
by this factory. But all of our wooden cabinet-based
products are made in the West.”
And shipped, increasingly, to China according to
Kinton, who suspects that the Chinese bubble may
be getting close to bursting as a new middle class
emerges demanding higher quality and pushing up
local costs. “There are more and more prestige
projects with very rich people involved,” he points
out, adding that this means they want European
products as opposed to Chinese ones. “In terms of
loudspeakers, European products have a great
caché and it’s a matter of some prestige for
a Chinese company to say they are the importer
and distributor of one of our brands. We have the
capacity to increase production as demand rises.”
The current Ohm building in Cheshire dates from
1983, but it’s no Thatcherite ‘Enterprise Zone’.
Olenski says that when he decided to switch from
backline to pro audio some 30 years ago there were
no hand-outs; it was a hard-nosed business decision
to catch the rising curve of sound reinforcement as it
blossomed into a sophisticated industry. Since then
Ohm has become very well known for its installation
This page, clockwise from top left:
L-R, Ohm’s Clive Kinton, Gareth
Coleman and company founder
Jo Olenski. Ohm installations - the
Vienna State Opera House (installer
- Ohm Germany) and the The L Bar
Restaurant, Lebanon (installer -
Triangle Sound & Image).
Facing page, scenes from the Ohm
factory.
products, but something new is afoot. The
company is newly focused on promoting its
touring credentials and, crucially, this is to be
manifest through both line array and point
source technology. Central to these initiatives
are last year’s arrivals: Finnish design engineer
Pasi Kokkonen, who is every bit as keen on
point source technology as Funktion One’s Tony
Andrews, and new blood Gareth Coleman,
a pro audio graduate and now sales engineer
for the UK.
Coleman is currently engaged in cementing
new UK distribution channels and strategic
partnerships. “The aim is to increase the
availability of Ohm products into the UK
market,” he says. “We should see this increase
dramatically over the next year or so through
these channels. Studio Spares is already
appointed as a distributor in the UK,
predominantly for the end user market, while
another big-name distributor will soon be
dealing with the B2B end of the market.
“We’ve also been working closely with big UK
names in the pro audio arena. We aim to
produce state-of-the-art, cutting edge
products - something done by getting on the
road with the people who count, the
engineers. The design of the new HDMX range
of monitors was created in partnership with
John Henry’s of London, where only the
highest-profile bands pass through for
rehearsals. Other hire companies have had
a big impact on the design of our products
over the last few years, and needless to say
these are now some of our best sellers.”
“We’ve always had point source products,”
Kinton continues, “but we’ve developed line
array alongside over the last 18 months
because of customer demand - and it’s very
successful. But at the same time we looked at
the point source products we had, especially
after Pasi came on board, and realised we
already had very good, high powered
contenders. After a few tweaks we’re now
ready to market point source as an alternative
to line array in a lot of applications. In fact, our
customers are more or less divided 50-50
between the two types of speaker solution.
Certainly horns, crossovers and drivers in the
time-honoured configurations are still key to
our development.”
Ersa Major is the big statement in vertical
array, a fully horn-loaded 3-way enclosure.
Other recent developments include the PUKK
range of subwoofers, the full-range Saturn 12 -
extending from a low of 45Hz(-3dB) to 20kHz
(-3dB) - and its higher powered sibling the
Saturn 15, with its 15” bass driver pulling the
-3dB point at the low end down to 35Hz.
Meanwhile new coaxial monitors MX-12 and
MX-15 are billed as capable of “blasting any
pop star’s ears off”, and the Spyder
Loudspeaker Management System declares
Ohm’s full high-end touring intentions, offering
software set-up across all DSP-led hardware.
“What we find illuminating,” reflects Kinton,
“is that people are consistently ‘pleasantly
surprised’ by our products, which means brand
perception is not necessarily accurate at the
moment. Our Vietnamese distributor, one of the
first to buy the line array, phoned me at three in
the morning in the middle of a club install to tell
me how amazed he was by the system, which
is lovely to hear but also reminds you that he
should have been expecting that. Well, we’re
going to re-focus the market’s awareness of
Ohm and make it clear just what quality there is
in these products.”
And then, probably ahead of Jodrell Bank,
Ohm will find that there’s more out there than
anybody imagined.
> www.ohm.co.uk